George Condo has been a singular voice in American and European art for almost three decades. Born in 1957 in New Hampshire, he studied art history and music theory then moved to New York, where he quickly became part of the burgeoning East Village art scene of the 80’s. He became close friends with artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Condo developed a unique painting style, employing the virtuoso draftsmanship and paint handling of the old masters. In the context of early 1980s, Condo’s paintings displayed provocative scenes, where he adopted a peculiar style, technique, and method of earlier painters and applied them to subjects. He explored an astonishing variety of aesthetic territories, from Mannerist to Picasso-esque Cubism, drawing from Diego Velázquez to Looney Tunes. Possessed of an enormous memory bank of art history, Condo synthesized these past pictorial languages and motifs to create an artwork of psychological states. He’s prolific and has produced an enormous body of work since the beginning of the 1980s. Portraiture, that seems to reflect the madness of everyday life is his main theme. As a contemporary painter of incredible talent and technique, he’s never hit the starry heights. His position during the 80’s was against the common flowing vague. He was an outsider, taking up Old Masters and learning their methods. Recently he has join ventured Hip Hop singer Kanye West creating his album cover. My beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

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The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties  unites the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/visit/

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